Organizations responsible for the maintenance and inventory of assets are turning to GIS as the tool of choice to manage and display these assets. Over eighty percent of the cost of a GIS is capturing and placing accurate, fully attributed data into the GIS. These costs have prohibited many users from either implementing or fully exploiting the GIS.
A number of different methods have been developed for capturing data in the field. Many users use the data collection method of traveling an inspection route, visually identifying the location, and hand writing a description onto a form or a paper entry. Once the inspector returns to the central data repository the entries so collected are manually entered into a database with questionable accuracy and time consuming labor. The user must build the correlation and association logic into the database to create a useful tool. Back end applications must also be created so that the information is useful to the user. More sophisticated methods include GPS with push button data collection or pen computer data entry units which allow predefined buttons and menus to be used for field data collection. The data can be electronically downloaded into a database, but a user must still build the correlation and association logic. The information downloaded is limited to point information with limited attribute information.
Audio based data entry systems have been developed but are limited to the recording of street point information sequenced with a manually recorded location input. The user is then required to manually convert, transfer, and combine the location data with the audio data. There is no processing of the audio data and manual transcription, and tagging of the entries with location data must be manually performed by the user. Only location data where a observation has been recorded is stored, and all other location information is ignored. Other speech recognition systems require the user to prerecord their speech to replace keyboard entries. None of the described systems provide the automatic population of the GIS with fully attributed and correlated data generated from speech recognition.
As users of spatial data incorporate GIS and GPS based technology, the need for a flexible, true end to end system that collects field data, populates a GIS, tracks field assets, and provides tools to exploit the data will increase.